The people had been walking in the desert for many days. When they’d departed from northern Mexico on their great northward migration, they’d been more than a hundred strong – men, women and children, well-practiced at surviving in this merciless land.

These people knew how to drink water from cacti, how to trap the mice and lizards that scurried among the rocks, and how to find shady places to sleep through the brutal midday heat.

But this miserable life was very different from the one they’d left behind.

They built astronomical observatories and innovative farming systems — and we don’t even know their names. Meet North America’s first great civilizations.

Nearly four thousand years ago — as the city of Babylon was first growing into a metropolis, and Egypt’s Middle Kingdom was in full swing — a group of hunters along North America’s Mississippi River assembled in their thousands, to build something very strange.

In a place that would someday be known as northern Louisiana, they staked out an area of some five hundred acres, and began to heap the earth into enormous mounds.Read more

My fascination with this started when, as a child growing up in Zimbabwe, I used to run and play amongst the ancient stone walls of the magnificent Zimbabwe Ruins. There is nothing more hauntingly beautiful or fascinating than a mysterious, long-gone civilization.